Hidden Charm

by Kristine Grayson

  Still he wanted to get to the edge of that crater, to see if Zel was in there, if he needed to get her out. He would change as quickly as he could back into his human form, grab her, and whisk her out of there, the extra magic be damned.

  He hopped cautiously toward the edge of the crater. His skin was cracking. His eyes burned. He had to look in—

  And something wrapped around his middle, pulling tight, and yanking him upwards.

  If he had still been in his human form, he would have grabbed at the thing around his middle, but he couldn’t. His front legs waved helplessly, and his back legs dangled downward

  He couldn’t even look straight down at his belly, because frogs weren’t built that way.

  So he had to look sideways, seeing what held him.

  And what held him was a tentacle, made of hair.

  Chapter 14

  One minute, Zel was trying to squeeze out of her house, her hair everywhere. The next, she was plastered face first against the prickly bark of the palm tree near the front of her house. She instinctively wrapped her arms and legs around the trunk, feeling the bark bite into her skin.

  Stuff hit her in the back, some of it hard and painful. She angled her hair pile downward, so that it covered her back. Now whatever hit her wouldn’t hit her directly.

  But the tug on the back of her head was heavier than it had been before. And extremely painful. Her neck ached.

  All of her ached.

  And her eyes burned.

  A literal sea of junk zoomed as some kind of wind pushed it forward. The wind was so strong that it also held her onto the tree, and the tree shuddered. The palm leaves rattled, and the entire tree bent forward just a little as the wind pushed it too.

  Then she heard chunking sounds. She looked down, and saw some swords and knives slam into the tree. They were below her feet. She hoped more wouldn’t hit her, but she didn’t know how to prevent it, how to keep them from hitting her.

  She clung to the tree and looked down. And in that moment, she saw Henry disappear into the junk. Then his clothes flew by. The wind was stronger than she thought to rip the clothes off of him.

  But they didn’t look ripped as they fluttered across her yard and into the street beyond.

  She looked back over her shoulder, her face getting pelted with small bits of dirt and wood, and saw that nothing remained of her house. Instead, the ground looked like the basin of a volcano after it had erupted. And the inside glowed.

  The top of the glow was red, but the edges of the basin were purple and black. Flames and smoke rose out of the middle like a gigantic caldron.

  The wind was dying down, but the air felt overheated, as if the molecules could erupt into flame.

  She looked up at the palm branches above her. They had stopped rattling, but they were shredded, and things she recognized, like books and towels, were caught in them.

  She couldn’t see the faeries and the magical crime scene folk below her or Selda or Henry or anyone. She wondered if they had gotten blown out of the yard.

  She squirmed a little, which made her hair shift, which tugged on the back of her head. Her skull felt twenty times heavier than it usually did—even when she was growing her own hair out, like she had to for jobs sometimes. The hair probably had debris in it, and she didn’t want to shake that debris loose, for fear that it might hurt someone on the ground.

  She twisted as much as she could, looking at the edge of that cauldron that had been her house, feeling numb.

  Then she saw a tiny frog emerge from the cloud of debris, hopping across the smoking boards toward the end of that caldron.

  What had Tank called Henry? Froggy. She had called him Froggy. And Henry had looked appalled. Then he had sent a sideways glance toward Zel, as if he had to check to see if she had heard Tank.

  Zel had, but it hadn’t registered until now.

  Henry was the Frog Prince that Sonny used to talk about. Sonny had always said he felt sorry for the Frog Prince, that the man had never gotten over…something.

  Zel hadn’t paid attention to magical gossip. She stayed as far away from the magical as she could most of the time.

  Henry was the Frog Prince, and that was a frog, an incongruous frog, heading toward the caldron.

  Frogs lived in moist environments. Frogs lived in water. If Henry had a froggy self, and it wasn’t an avatar, he was in trouble.

  And his clothes had blown past her. Some of the magical removed their clothing before they transformed. Sonny had once explained it was part of the spell that they created for their transformation. He had been ridiculing the Superman phone booth change at the time.

  Sonny.

  And now Henry.

  What was he doing, hopping to the edge of that caldron? His frog skin would dry out. It would burn up.

  He would die.

  Even before she gave it conscious thought, Zel unwrapped a rope-strand of hair and sent it into the mess.

  She wrapped it around the frog’s middle and plucked him out of the debris.

  He dangled, froglike, back legs downward, front legs bent upward, his head twisting.

  He couldn’t see her, but he had to know it was her.

  She gently brought him around until he was only a few yards from her.

  His skin was a grayish green and cracked. His eyes looked flaky and dry. She had never seen a frog look like this.

  “Henry?” she asked, just to make sure she hadn’t rescued some random frog.

  He nodded.

  “Can you handle chlorine?” she asked, and then, before he answered, she realized he didn’t have to handle chlorine. She didn’t need to dump him in a swimming pool like she had planned. Her next-door neighbors had a koi pond.

  She whipped him away from her, over the fence to her left, and into her neighbor’s back yard. She set him, as carefully as she could, in the koi pond. That at least would have the right PH balance, and it would probably be good for his skin.

  Oh, what did she know? She knew very little about magic or magic frogs or any kind of frog.

  She didn’t know anything about anything that was going on this morning. Someone—something—had blown up her house, and that had been the last place Sonny had been, and his sword was gone, and he was trapped somewhere, and he was probably dead, and she was alive only because she had been thrown against this tree near the house, and there were probably injured magical beings on the ground below her, and it was all because of her.

  Or Sonny.

  What had he gotten into?

  It would be so easy to suspect him, but the house hadn’t blown up when he was in it.

  It had blown up with her inside.

  And that was scary and awful and personal, and she had no idea what she had done to become a magical target—not now, and not in her childhood.

  Despair so deep that it nearly choked her bubbled up, like those flames out of the caldron. She hadn’t let herself despair when she had been trapped in the tower. She had tamped the despair down, trying to accept that her life was constricted.

  Then she had freedom here and the despair rose, and she had talked to Sonny and the conversations had made things better.

  She couldn’t have survived without Sonny. And now, maybe, because she had chosen to ignore all that had happened to her (all that had happened to them), he had been taken or killed, their home destroyed. Maybe even the person who had done this magic thought Zel was dead.

  She let out a breath. She couldn’t despair. She had to take action. Now whoever this was hadn’t just hurt her and Sonny. This person (these people?) had hurt faeries and a number of people in the magical community. They had nearly dried out Henry, for god’s sake.

  Zel curled up the rope-strand of hair that she had used to dump Henry in the koi pond. She couldn’t see him clearly, so she didn’t know how he was doing, but at least she knew he was safe.

  The rope-strand returned, damp at the ends, and smelling of fish. The scent wafted past her, and then she sneezed. Lo
ts of dirt and dust was trying to exit her body, even as she was stuck in this tree.

  She closed her eyes, and leaned her head against the trunk, feeling the rough bark, the needle-like edges, the solidity of the tree itself. She couldn’t slide down without badly scratching her arms and legs. She would have to climb down slowly, using her hair.

  She hated using her hair like that.

  And she was so tired. She had already used more magical energy than she ever thought she had.

  She focused on her hair, untangling bits of it, ignoring the debris still stuck in it. She would worry about that mess later.

  She needed to wrap the hair around the tree trunk thickly, like a curving ladder. She slowly wrapped the hair around the tree. The movement wasn’t as smooth as usual, and the hair stuck out in various places because of the gigantic tangles and the debris, but it would work.

  Except for the one part she didn’t like: she was going to have to sever the hair from her skull.

  Usually she cut the hair. She had a special pair of scissors in her office that she had magicked so that it could cut through the strands. Over the decades, she had learned how to make the cuts even and clean, so that no one ever suspected she cut her hair creations from her own head.

  But she couldn’t get those scissors here if she wanted to. She barely had enough energy to wrap the tree.

  She was going to have to use one of the oldest spells she had learned, one she absolutely hated.

  She was going to have to make her scalp reject the hair follicles.

  It would take a great mental effort. Essentially, she had to work the follicles out of her skin as if they were splinters, embedded just underneath.

  She had to focus briefly on each strand, because if she missed one, she would end up ripping it out. When she started doing this early on, her scalp would end up raw and bleeding because she had accidentally torn out so many strands by the roots.

  She didn’t want to be bleeding this time. She just wanted down. And then she would deal with the mess below.

  In the distance, sirens wailed. For a second, she dismissed the sound. Then she realized that even in the Greater World, her house was gone. The magical crime scene folks or Selda or Zel herself would have to make it seem to the first responders as if there was a reason the house blew up.

  And she didn’t know right now what that reason would be.

  She needed to get down first.

  She made herself focus on the hair follicles, pushing them quickly, but one at a time, out of her scalp. The procedure itched, and hair brushed against her shoulders as it fell away.

  It remained wrapped around the tree, though. She had anchored it all in before she had gotten to this stage.

  It seemed to take forever for all of the hair to fall out of her scalp, but she knew that, in reality, it had only taken two or three minutes. Hair littered her arms and legs, draping over her body that was still wrapped around the tree.

  Her muscles ached, and now her scalp itched. But the pressure on her head and neck had eased. She felt lighter than she had all morning.

  She opened her eyes, and took a deep breath. Now she was going to have to climb down her hair.

  That technique always made her nervous. When she was a girl, she had tried numerous times to climb out of the tower like this, but Aite had always caught her and punished her. It wasn’t until Sonny revealed the wards that Zel knew why Aite would show up immediately.

  But knowing that the wards were gone didn’t help entirely. This kind of magic—this exact spell—tied so deeply into her childhood that Zel trembled at the very thought of executing the past part of it.

  Aite had never shown up until Zel was actually out the window and climbing on the hair.

  Zel squeezed her eyes closed, and reminded herself, as Sonny had taught her, that she was in the Greater World now. Then she made herself focus on those sirens, growing closer.

  There were no sirens like that in the Kingdom that she had grown up in. The woods had been silent.

  Everything had been silent, except for the rustle of tree leaves, and the birds, and what little noises she made herself.

  She gathered up her courage like bits of her hair, pasted it all into a single band of courage, and slowly unhooked her right arm from the tree. Bits of bark stuck out of her skin. More was probably inside her skin. But she couldn’t worry about that right now.

  Instead, she needed to climb down.

  She brushed the hair off her arms and shoulders, and away from her back, where it had protected her.

  It dangled downward, its weight shaking the tree.

  Then she grabbed the tree again with her right hand, bracing herself as she unwrapped her legs from the tree trunk. The bark needles pulled at her skin, and she ignored the feeling as best she could.

  She brought her legs downward, feeling the side of the tree with her feet, until they touched the top of one of the hair ropes. She used that to brace one foot as the other went farther down. Then she stretched until her arms were high above her head.

  She climbed down like that, feet finding purchase on her hair ropes, hands following.

  Mostly she held the bark with her hands, not her hair. Because if the hair somehow untangled itself from the tree, she would fall backwards, and maybe land on someone.

  She couldn’t do that—not after all she had done to rescue the faeries.

  The sirens sounded even closer. Her heart rate rose again, thinking about all the lies she might have to tell people who had only come to help, the magic spells she might have to perform on them so that what they found here would seem normal in the Greater World.

  She had loved this house. Even after the recent remodel, she had loved it.

  And now, it was gone.

  Her foot hit something solid. She had to look down. She saw the knives and swords that had chunked into the tree trunk. She wanted to dislodge them, but she didn’t dare. Not yet.

  She wondered if Sonny’s sword had made it out of the house in one piece, and then she wondered if she would ever know.

  She cast that thought aside. She needed to get down first.

  She twisted around the tree trunk just a little, to avoid the sharp metal edges of the knives and swords.

  The lateral move made the trip down harder, but it also made her feel a little more in control of what she was doing. The adrenaline that had gotten her this far had revved back up again when she had seen the knives and swords.

  She didn’t have time to be tired. She needed to handle everything, something she had never done.

  It took a few more minutes, but she finally reached the base of the tree. Before she put her feet down, though, she looked at the ground. No one seemed to be around the base. Had anyone even known she had been in the tree?

  There was no one in this part of the yard either, which was probably good, considering how much house debris was scattered all over the concrete blocks, brick porch and the fence.

  She gingerly placed her feet on the bits of glass and wood that littered the tree base. The heat from the caldron behind her seemed to suck all the moisture out of her skin.

  Had Henry felt like this? Why had he been on the edge of that caldron anyway?

  She had no idea.

  She ran a hand over her bald pate, and felt tiny dried balls of blood. So she hadn’t loosened all the strands after all. It might have hurt to remove them, but she really hadn’t felt it, not with everything else going wrong.

  The skin on the underside of her arm was dotted, red, and bleeding as well. The tree had hurt her after all. Of course, she had probably hurt it, by slamming into it so hard.

  The sirens whooped, sounding only a block or two away.

  She turned toward the main part of the yard, saw debris piled up nearly two feet high, as if it had hit something solid. Then she realized that it had. Someone had used enough magic to erect a barrier.

  The rest of the magical were probably behind that barrier.

  She let out
a small sigh of relief. No wonder they hadn’t helped her.

  They couldn’t see her.

  But they were safe.

  For now.

  Chapter 15

  Sirens whooped as they got closer and closer.

  Henry dunked his entire body into the koi pond. The fish were big enough to eat him for lunch. Fortunately, they appeared to be well fed. They swam by him, viewing him with fishy curiosity, but not doing much more than puckering their mouths at him.

  The water was filthy with dirt and fish poop and the remains of whatever incredibly disgusting stuff the koi were fed. The rocks were covered in slime. The humans in charge of this koi pond did not keep it up as well as they could.

  But the water felt good on his skin.

  Hell, the water felt necessary. Zel had probably saved his life when she plucked him off the edge of that caldron and dropped him here.

  All she had done was pull him toward her—in some tree—looked at him, said his name, and then when he nodded, dumped him in this pond. She had been thinking about a swimming pool, and he was so glad she hadn’t dumped him there. Because the chlorine would have stung, and the chemicals would have ruined his skin, even before he could put some kind of protect spell around himself.

  He hadn’t been able to assess how Zel looked in that quick instant. His eyes were so dry they weren’t seeing properly, plus he hadn’t entirely adjusted to what he privately called frog vision.

  He had seen her face, which looked—bigger than he expected, of course, but…the rest didn’t entirely compute. He hadn’t even been able to figure out exactly where she was.

  She—or rather that tentacle of hair—had moved him so fast that his head still whirled thinking about it. And then she dumped him in the water, and he felt such relief that it made him feel guilty.

  He leveraged himself up the rocks toward the moist edge of the pool. The sirens were really loud. He hoped that Selda was conscious enough to deal with this.

  The last thing everyone needed were good intentioned first responders trampling all over the faeries and pixies on the lawn. The first responders might not see the faeries or the pixies, even if they weren’t covered in debris.